Friday, March 28, 2008

Here's a throwback idea that might offer a way out for Microsoft | Coop's Corner : A Blog from Charlie Cooper - CNET News.com

Timing is everything... The Navio/NCI stuff was not ready for prime time, a dozen years ago.

Where is he heading with all this? Microsoft's not saying much but my colleague Dan Farber wrote after Ozzie's speech that Microsoft's likely "working on the plumbing required to create a seamless mesh that can synchronize content, services and applications across a variety of devices and user scenarios via the Web as a hub."

Sounds plausible but what an irony that a decade ago, Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy were talking about a not all too different scenario. At the time, those two were barnstorming around the country to promote the then-foreign concept of the network computer. Of course, their aim was to sink Microsoft by obviating the need for a rich proprietary operating system. But at a basic level, the network computer idea revolved around what today we would call cloud computing. Unfortunately for Sun Microsystems and Oracle, it would take another decade before the industry would create fast enough connections and enough storage to make it feasible.